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Windows needs a change in priorities

den.dev

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Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#131

Post by mikevin »

rbut wrote: post #56

Talking about dark patterns, here are a couple I've noticed. In Windows, I'm very careful about NOT signing in to anything Microsoft, unless I have to. I make sure I use a local administrator account instead of a Microsoft account. Yesterday I had to open Microsoft Edge for something that would only work in Edge, and lo-and-behold, Microsoft had taken my Xbox Game Pass sign-in and applied to Edge, then informed me th…

> It's even worse when you activate Office 365. There is a small checkbox at the end which if you don't uncheck, converts your local administrator into your Microsoft account.. Going back to a local administrator account is not an easy task.

I'm not even sure it's possible, I've tried multiple approaches but gave up after almost having to do a clean install.

Now I have to deal with an accountname that contains multiple characters that make WSL interactions with the windows paths a game of Russian roulette with shell quoting bullets.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#132

Post by hackerfromthefu »

marssaxman wrote: post #104
sylens wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an interesting interview on the Windows Weekly podcast with Chris Capossela (CMO of consumer at Microsoft) a little ways back I believe where the hosts asked Chris why there is no ability to do just this - I believe the answer was that Microsoft views these features as valuable to the user, so why would they think that a user would want to turn them off?

I wonder, do marketing types actually believe that kind of nonsense? Could it actually be true for them, personally, that they feel they get some benefit from intrusive communication? That would be such a different experience of the world that it's difficult to wrap my head around. And yet... I was once griping about one or another of the many tricky ways excessively-clever web designers abuse javascript to impose th…

No, they do not. The ones who are making choices about it anyway. They just realise they can manipulate the masses.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#133

Post by keithnz »

I don't mind the UX so much, its pretty good for the most, I'd probably put any gripes I had at the bottom of the list.

But 100% agree that they have got to kill treating windows as a marketing channel to advertise and arbitrarily making edge hard to customize to avoid being pushed the Microsoft narrative. Telemetry I'm not as concerned about, but it should be easy to turn off, and it should ask you before using windows if you want to turn it off. I'd leave it on. But obscuring this stuff just loses peoples trust. Trust is the battleground at the moment, google, facebook, apple, microsoft are really burning their bridges in this area. You don't get that back easily, people are still angry at Microsoft for stuff they did 3 decades ago.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#134

Post by petilon »

coryrc wrote: post #52
segphault wrote: post #22

Like every Windows user, I have had a lot of frustrating experiences with the abusive behavior and dark patterns that have taken over the platform. Like when they started having Skype silently run in the background logged in with the user's Microsoft account without any notice or human intervention, and removed the setting to disable it from launching at startup so that it couldn't be prevented. I had to completely u…

> Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste" -- Steve Jobs

You could say that about the post-Steve-Jobs Apple as well.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#135

Post by mindwok »

8note wrote: post #121
jthrowsitaway wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it pushes people towards better OSes (any *nix IMO) that's a good thing. I was tired of Windows back in the XP days.

Imo, the best OS has the software that I want to run. I think wine is doing a more important job than MS at allowing windows to die

Agree. Wine, Proton and associated libraries are allowing Windows to slowly go the way of the dinosaur. If those projects keep delivering I genuinely believe the year of the Linux desktop will slowly approach.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#136

Post by robertwt7 »

having both mac and PC (windows), it is honestly very frustrating to see how significant small bugs are there when it is launched. I found myself constantly trying to raise my voice in microsoft but don't know where to go. Simple things such as task manager and file explorer are super laggy. I'm not sure how does the PM / QA approve that when they launch?

At least in apple, it just works, I don't think I've ever felt super frustrated that I feel like I want to find a way to report a bug. Sure they've got a feedback form / assistant that may or may not be answered as well, but I don't remember the last time I want to report something in apple. Community forum is good, apple support is 1 click away for hardware related. You just feel the definition of "it just works".

Sure its hard to manage 2 of the biggest tech companies in the world. but when will MS ever learn?

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#137

Post by gruez »

banana_giraffe wrote: post #80
mwcampbell wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that WSL 1 or 2?

WSL 1, my attempt to install WSL 2 after this BSOD failed miserably, put a machine in a boot loop, I haven't dug into what was going on there.

AFAIK WSL 1 isn't actively being worked on anymore, now that there's WSL 2. As for your issue with WSL 2, it runs off hyper-v, so my guess is that there's something with your BIOS/UEFI/firmware settings that's breaking it (eg. secureboot/CSM, TPM, virtualization).

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#138

Post by Espressosaurus »

tcmart14 wrote: post #119
lucasyvas wrote: post #29

These problems tend to work themselves out naturally - when you purposefully damage your user experience, you lose the early tech adopters that originally drove your product growth. They instead flock to a competitor that leaves you holding your bag of a shitty product. There are a few companies flirting with this dangerous line right now and it opens them up completely for disruption, which is the opposite of what t…

I don't think pleasing tech adopters is what help windows at this point. Maybe 20 year ago, sure. Today, most consumers of Windows that are not business/enterprise, are probably doing it more so because that was the defacto OS for them when they were in grade school, and it has been the defacto OS on most computers sub $1K. We are seeing some market shift to chrome OS and there is probably a good future where Chrome…

If you think Chrome OS is going to save you, you haven't been paying attention to Google for the past 10 years.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#139

Post by skoskie »

lucasyvas wrote: post #29

These problems tend to work themselves out naturally - when you purposefully damage your user experience, you lose the early tech adopters that originally drove your product growth. They instead flock to a competitor that leaves you holding your bag of a shitty product. There are a few companies flirting with this dangerous line right now and it opens them up completely for disruption, which is the opposite of what t…

Add MacOS to the list. The continued crippling of the OS for power users keeps pushing us toward the iOS experience, and it’s killing me. I can’t see details of my own log files for privacy reasons. The new Finder design is just awful and accomplished nothing for all the change. Now I learn I can’t make hardlinks for directories on APFS. The list goes on.

Re: Windows needs a change in priorities

#140

Post by the_snooze »

rthomas6 wrote: post #101
Silhouette wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody at Microsoft who has decision-making authority actually cares. Acknowledging this is the first step. The second is figuring out what would make them care or how to remove them so someone who does care can take over. That's a much harder thing to do. Realistically Microsoft is in a similar position to the likes of Google and Facebook. They have such an entrenched monopoly, bought through years of ignored warnin…

What is wrong with Linux nowadays? I've used it as my main driver for long enough that I can't see the big problems that are preventing everyone from switching. Like, it seems easier than even WSL to me. Beginner friendly distos seem to have solved the package management problem, and there are adequate desktop environments, office suites, browsers, gaming, and everything else. If a person has good hardware compatibil…

>What is wrong with Linux nowadays?

Linux is great for doing things on your own. Where it fails is when you have to sync up with other people's proprietary norms.

For example, I'm a researcher who gets funding from the US government. I can do my day-to-day technical work in Linux. But I'm forced to still use Windows to present PowerPoint slides over Teams to my funding overlords, because that's what they use, and I have to conform to that. Linux ports/knock-offs of those products just don't interoperate with proprietary MS systems well enough for me to rely on them. Unless the US government (or at least the relevant parts I deal with) ditches Microsoft products, I have to keep a foot in MS-land to carry out the accountability parts of my job.

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